No justice for Washington

Published 9:00 pm, Friday, March 24, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Northwest sports-conspiracy theorists, if you still have your ticket from the line after the Super Bowl, please take your place in the usual and accustomed positions.

That would be:

Bent over.

Again, another Seattle team on the national stage took a hosing from execrable officiating.

Again, a big game was lost to a higher-profile team that the powers would prefer advance.

And again, as much as conspiracy emotionally fits the crime, the fact was the local team, just as the Seahawks experienced in the Super Bowl, still could have won despite the incompetence.

That brutal truth will resonate around the University of Washington in the many years this game will be analyzed, rehashed and wailed over.

One of the more remarkable evenings in college basketball history, a howler won 98-92 in overtime by top-seeded Connecticut at nearly 1 o'clock this morning here on the East Coast, cruelly eliminated the (W)Huskies from the NCAA Tournament and let the (C)Huskies move on to almost assuredly a Final Four berth next weekend in Indianapolis.

The (W)Huskies absolutely, irrevocably and undeniably deserved to win this game. But nobody said there was absolute justice in sports. Because it's just like everything else in life.

Ever the stoic, Washington coach Lorenzo Romar, who devised a brilliant defensive game plan that crippled UConn for much of the game, stayed to the high road and would not bend to the emotions that convulsed the few thousand purple-clad fans that made the cross-country trek to Verizon Center.

"You're going to get calls, you're not going to get calls," he said. "That's part of the game."

Yet even his counterpart, the semi-stunned Jim Calhoun, who hailed Washington's effort in "a game I'll remember the rest of my life," contended the game's crucial call -- personal and technical fouls on Washington star Brandon Roy with 13 minutes left and Washington up 53-45, forcing him to the bench with four fouls -- should not have happened.

"Both players got in each other's faces," said Calhoun, referring to momentary, and mild, woofing between his star, Rudy Gay, and Roy. "My honest belief, I don't think they did (deserved technicals) -- well, I'm not going to have a discussion and have a fine come back to UConn.

"But the bottom line is that I let kids play on. Kids are going to get emotional in a game like that, and I don't think Brandon or Rudy were trying to do anything more. It was such an incredibly intense game."

That call was followed by at least two others, a phantom fifth foul against the UW's Justin Dentmon and a failure to award Roy a bucket after a blatant goal tend by UConn's Hilton Armstrong, that allowed UConn to stay in a game in which they had trailed throughout the second half.

But despite these officiating errors, all UW senior Mike Jensen had to do was let Marcus Williams make a layin with 11 seconds left in regulation, and Washington, ahead 80-76, likely would have won.

Instead, he foolishly hacked Williams and failed to stop the shot. The resulting three-point play gave UConn life, which, after two free throws by Roy, they seized when senior guard Rashad Anderson bombed home a devastating trey with 1.8 seconds left to force OT.

Anyone who recalled the 1998 tourney game in Greensboro, N.C., between these schools won by Rip Hamilton with a buzzer-beating putback, please feel free to insert the same dagger in the same hole. The wound figures to be open.

The overtime had to go UConn's way, if only because it seemed like everyone in the building with a Washington's driver's license had four fouls. It was already a miracle that UW lasted as long as it did with six players with four fouls over the game's final five minutes.

The defeat not only wiped out the (W)Huskies' season, it spoiled one of the more heroic efforts in the school's hoops history.

"No team has disrupted us as much on offense," said Calhoun, referring most to an astonishing 26 turnovers that nearly ruined his squad. "Their effort was extraordinary. I thought they did an incredible, incredible job."

It also spoiled a dominant game from Jamaal Williams, who scored a career-high 27 points in his final game, taking his baby jump-hook Charles Barkley-style into the faces of the nation's best shot-blocking team and getting away with it, time and again.

And it ended a game that was as majestic as it was awful, intense as it was slapstick.

If anyone needed an explanation of why this tourney is called March Madness, this game will forever be Exhibit 1-A.

Unfortunately for the (W)Huskies, there is no reward for gallantry, no bracket advance for playing well beyond one's talents. Just as there is no alternative for justice denied.